i HETEROGENEOUS IT INNOVATION DEVELOPING INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECTURAL KNOWLEDGE

ii Multiple information technologies are converging. Crucial to organizations ’ relentless struggle to remain competitive, IT innovation processes must now increasingly take into consideration a multitude of stationary, mobile, and even embedded information technologies and their associated use contexts. In assembling such ubiquitous computing environments, multiple organizations with diverging interests and capabilities are involved. Indeed, heterogeneous component technologies are frequently associated with independent markets lacking a dominant actor knowledgeable about more than fragments of the combined capabilities present. A resulting lack of architectural knowledge poses a challenge to organizations attempting to assemble innovative computing environments spanning these boundaries. In this thesis, heterogeneous IT innovation processes are conceptualized as dependent on dispersed component technologies and associated competencies bound together by boundary-spanning architectural knowledge. This perspective is formalized as a research model assessed over a five-year action research project in the Swedish transport industry. The research project involved an industry network of independen